Communications/Alumni Affairs

For years, The Extended Campuses of Northern Arizona University used a traditional marketing model. The four-person marketing team would create an annual budget and tie its goals and specific projects to it. Freelancers and local advertising agencies provided support for the 50 or so marketing pieces produced throughout the year.

That model worked fine until around 2010, says Ann Marie deWees, director of strategic marketing. “Then things began to change with increasing digital expectations.”

Miami Dade College is the largest and most diverse higher ed institution in the U.S., serving a community as large as the state of Rhode Island. It has 175,000 students and offers more than 300 academic degree programs. Despite its large student body, MDC could serve even more students, so it spends thousands of dollars each year on marketing via the web, radio, and newspaper to attract new applicants.

Although the University of Virginia has approximately 200,000 living alumni, until recently, the university was only communicating electronically with a fraction of them; 43,000 had email addresses on record. Because the university consists of so many campus organizations—11 schools and 30 foundations—creating and managing a central alumni database for online communications proved difficult. Each school and foundation managed its own list of email recipients. The information “was very siloed,” explains Deke Shrum, assistant director of interactive media at U.Va.